“DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT CLEMENCEAU SAID ABOUT WAR, MANDRAKE?”

12/4/09

In today’s (i.e., Friday, 12/4/09’s) lead editorial, the Wall Street Journal lambastes our NATO partners for what the Journal considers their miserly approach to defense and the Obama administration for continuing a long trend toward reduced defense spending as a percent of GDP. The Journal trots out its usual chart showing that the percentage of GDP devoted to defense spending has declined markedly since 1960 in a more or less continuous pattern.

Why does the Journal insist on defending its perennial argument for more defense spending with the canard that there is somehow an inherent and direct relationship between the size of GDP and the necessity for greater defense spending? We spend on defense when we need defending. We don’t necessarily have a greater need for defense as our GDP grows. The Journal seems to be arguing that spending on defense should be a constant share of GDP regardless of the presence or absence of foreign threats. This is nonsense. Heavy spending on defense even when threats, or at least threats that can be met and defeated by conventional military means, are quiescent lead to waste of resources. More dangerously, such spending also sustains and enhances a huge bureaucracy that, like most bureaucracies, is always looking for things to do to defend and increase its bureaucratic prerogatives. Freedom and enterprise are always in danger when government bureaucracies are looking for ways to sustain and enhance themselves, and the danger is especially great when the defense establishment is starting to feel extraneous.

Defense is, of course, government’s primary job. But spending on defense, even though it is the most important government spending, is still government spending. It still saps the private sector and citizenry of some element of its vitality, and, like any other government spending, should be done only to the extent necessary. Looking for ways to deploy money spent on defense is especially debilitating to a society. As someone once said, war is to government what fertilizer is to plants.